Emerging writers run wild at this Spring Fling edition of our popular Next Big Thing series. Join us on the rooftop garden terrace of narrm ngarrgu Library and hear from some of Australia’s brightest ...

Rodney Croome is an advocate for gay human rights and author of Why vs Why: Gay Marriage. Rodney Croome fronted the high-profile campaign to decriminalise homosexuality in Tasmania in the 1990s and ...

John Safran recounts his time squatting in a celebrity’s abandoned mansion. On the page and on the small screen, John Safran is known for pushing boundaries – his own, other people’s and society’s – ...

Jamie Oliver started cooking at his parent’s pub, The Cricketers, in Clavering, Essex, at the age of eight and has since worked with some of the world’s top chefs. He is now running Fifteen - one of ...

Robodebt saw close to half a million Australian welfare recipients illegally pursued over fake debts, with catastrophic results. Journalist and author Rick Morton followed the case closely and in his ...

Ingrid Betancourt, a French-Colombian politician and author of the memoir Even Silence Has an End, was held hostage from 2002 to 2008 by FARC rebels. Ingrid Betancourt was born in Colombia and raised ...

Jeffrey Eugenides’ first novel, The Virgin Suicides (1993) was translated into 15 languages and made into a major motion picture. In 2003, Eugenides received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex ...

Sir Tom Stoppard is one of British theatre’s most prolific exports: a giant of modern playwriting, and one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. The writer – whose ...

Liao Yiwu is a Chinese poet, novelist and screenwriter currently living in exile in Germany because of government suppression of his work in China. He is the author of the epic poem ‘Massacre’, the ...

Christopher Paolini was educated at home by his parents. His abiding love of fantasy and science fiction inspired him to write his debut novel, Eragon, when he graduated from high school at 15.

Eleanor Catton was born in 1985 in Canada and raised in Christchurch, New Zealand. She won the 2007 Sunday Star-Times short-story competition, the 2008 Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship to the Iowa Writers' ...